Archived Posts: December 2006-May 2015

Savannah reminded me the other day that I used to be nocturnal. I had this job once that required me to work nights for two weeks, then days for two weeks. My circadian rhythm hated me the whole time, and it hated Archie Bunker too, which frankly caused a lot of arguments between us, most of which we settled amicably.

Note my nocturnal beard, which protected me from the light.

Working nights wasn't the coolest thing ever, but there were certain associated perks. One was that, on my nights off, I got to stay up all night watching episode after episode of mind-numbingly stupid TV shows (are there any other kind?). I never got two nights off in a row, so it just never made sense to try to turn my night off into a day off with my family, because that would require working all night then staying up throughout the next day, followed by sleeping through the night and then staying up the next day and then working throughout the next night without any sleep. So instead I watched dumb TV shows, which seemed sensible enough, in much the same way eating uranium is sensible.

I wouldn't even have thought to pass the nights watching serials, but one night early on in my nine-month stint as a nocturnal mammal I was complaining to a coworker of how boring my nights off were. "I just stay up and write in my journal til I'm about to fall asleep, and then I bite my fingernails for awhile," I whined. "Oh, you're very pathetic," she said in a concerned tone. "I have a bunch of TV shows on DVD that you can borrow so that, over time, you can become less pathetic." She listed off several shows that offended my delicate moral sensibilities (i.e. Her: "I have the entire collection of Magnum P.I." Me: "Mustaches offend me.") before she began to fathom the true depth of my pathetic-ness and tried suggesting family shows (i.e. Her: "Oscar the Grouch doesn't offend you, right?" Me: "Well... actually...") Finally we settled on a serial called Everwood, which is about a brain surgeon whose wife dies and so he moves with his two kids to this horrible Colorado small town where everyone's always up in everyone else's bid-ness. Things were pretty tame until the guy's son got the son's babysitter pregnant, and I was like, "Whoa, things just got weird." It wasn't a high point in my life, sitting there at 3:30 a.m. watching this inane TV show on VHS recordings. By contrast, a high point in my life was when I beat up a deaf kid. I'm just giving you the full spectrum of my coolness.